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(AP Photo/Susan Walsh) House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes enters the committee area on January 16, 2018, where Steve Bannon was being interviewed. T he Russians are back, big time. The Russian bots, that is. And that means something big is happening in the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. We all know who reaped the rewards of that intrusion. Over the course of the last 48 hours, bots linked to the Russian Federation have gone viral on a Twitter hashtag created by Republican lawmakers who claim the Obama administration illegally spied on Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign during FBI surveillance of Russian diplomats and figures linked to the Kremlin. Never mind the problematic fact that Kremlin-linked figures under surveillance were chit-chatting with a presidential campaign that stood to gain from a Russian influence operation. In Age of Trump, such facts are easily...

(Anthony Behar/Sipa USA via AP Images) Hundreds demonstrate against racism in Times Square on Martin Luther King Day in New York on January 15, 2018. O n my way out the door on January 11, I caught a glimpse of CNN on the TV, noting the news of the day: The text banner at the bottom of the screen said the president of the United States had called Haiti, El Salvador, and the nations of Africa “shithole countries.” I rolled my eyes and went on my way. Always knew the dude was racist; who didn’t? It took hours before I realized that I had never seen an expletive spelled out in full on a television news chyron . Because, really, we’ve been in the Age of Shitholiness for a while now. Like since January 20, 2017. The following morning brought the out-of-body experience of hearing the word uttered by the very precise Korva Coleman of NPR. It was a quote from the president, after all, as reported by senators who had attended the meeting at which he uttered it. But it was also a cultural...

(Gage Skidmore/Flickr) Steve Bannon Y ou’d hardly be human if you didn’t feel a twinge of glee at the fall of Steve Bannon. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, you might say. Bannon’s resignation from Breitbart News might even restore your faith in the resilience of democracy—but it shouldn’t. However delicious the ignominious fate of the man who painted himself as Svengali to the dummy in the Oval, Bannon’s fast descent from savior to pariah illustrates structural rot in the machinery of the republic, wrought by a Supreme Court whose majority acts in the favor of aspiring oligarchs. Sure, Bannon set his fate in motion through his own hubris. But ultimately his crash stemmed from the whims of a single donor family, as did his rise. Without Rebekah Mercer, daughter of hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, Bannon would never have secured his top spot on the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. Without Mercer, Bannon might never have been granted his role as the guiding force of...

(AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Donald Trump and Melania Trump arrive for a New Year's Eve party at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 31, 2017. W hen the history of America’s final days as a republic is written, it may be fairly said that a hostile foreign power helped elect an authoritarian president with no agenda other than plunder, that the majority of America’s white people took the plunderer’s racist, misogynist bait—and that the Congress of the United States helped him loot the public commons and cover up his likely crimes. And that’s just the CliffsNotes version. As the president sets about destroying the nation’s public institutions, Congress is launching investigations of the president’s investigators: the FBI, career Justice Department employees, and the special counsel appointed to investigate the president’s ties to Russian government agents during the 2016 presidential election. The Republican Congress, it seems, would rather investigate the president’s electoral...

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin House Speaker Paul Ryan leaves the House Chamber after voting on the Republican tax bill W ith the passage of the Republican tax bill, there’s no longer room for doubt: The big heist is on. The looting of the national commons is well underway, and now those behind it feel no need to hide it. Let’s face it—this is why they allowed President Donald J. Trump to happen. He may not have been the first pick of GOP leaders, who would have preferred a more subtle approach, something that looked more like the invisible hand of the market than outright pillage. But once Trump had the nomination locked up, they fell in line. However ugly things might get, a bonanza awaited the crowd that carried Trump across the White House threshold. You’ve likely heard by now that 83 percent of the gains to taxpayers in the bill go to the top 1 percent, ranked by income. How the tax cuts for middle-income earners are modest and temporary, while the cuts for corporations are robust and...